An alphabet soup of players and policies could have a big impact on where you live, how much you pay for housing, and whether or not you are denied a chance to move into a neighborhood that's good for your kids.

As my partner and I are both attorneys who work on and in support of public education, private school was not an option for us, so we decided to look for homes further out but with highly rated public schools. At the risk of sounding naïve, I was wholly unprepared for the reality that came with prioritizing high-quality public schools in my home search.

It's long been one of the country's designated loser cities, beginning in the 1960s, when change hit it hard. The phrase at the time was "urban blight," a social cancer with unexamined causes that, in the ensuing years, has gotten progressively worse.

People of color disproportionately received federally insured loans -- backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) -- to finance the purchase of their homes and to refinance existing mortgages.

A new report from seven housing and policy agencies suggests evidence of a two-tiered mortgage market in which borrowers and communities of color are increasingly cut off from prime conventional financing.